using stories to increase adoption of your employee ... · stories are the secret lever to increase...

Using Stories to Increase Adoption of Your Employee Engagement Program

Storytelling: The Secret Lever to Increasing Belief & Adoption Among Managers and Employees

USING STORIES TO INCREASE ADOPTION OF YOUR EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT PROGRAM

As an HR leader, you see change happening at your organization. You’ve implemented a new people success strategy. Leaders are increasingly recognizing the value of employee feedback.

There’s buzz about employee engagement around your offices. Perhaps some managers have even implemented changes and interventions to positively impact their teams.

Congratulations! You’ve taken big steps, and they’re beginning to pay off.

But there’s still work to be done. You want to accelerate this success. You want to increase leadership buy-in, inspire your employees to share even more of their feedback and ideas, and most importantly, drive widespread manager adoption and action-taking. All of this is easier said than done. How do you more deeply embed the value of your new employee engagement approach and inspire everyone in your organization to believe, act like a champion, and take action?

Answer: Build inspiration through stories.

Stories are the secret lever to increase buy-in for ideas and programs. They reinforce key messages, teach lessons, and shape behaviors, both in the course of our everyday lives, as well as at work.

Stories can also be used as a way to recognize and celebrate individuals and teams, reinforcing the value of action-taking at the organizational level. And once storytelling becomes an ingrained habit, it cultivates a culture of sharing best practices that lights up organizations.

This whitepaper will help you understand how to accelerate on your people success initiatives through storytelling. It will help you more clearly grasp the value of stories and define simple steps to finding the right ones, packaging them effectively, and sharing them in a way that moves leaders, managers, and employees to engage more deeply in your initiatives.


Dr. Howard Gardner, professor at Harvard University, author of Multiple Intelligences

“Stories constitute the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s arsenal.”

What Is A Story? A Primer

We all intuitively know what a story is. But how do you articulate what one looks like?

At Glint, we define a story as a narrative account of an event or situation. The details of an experience are arranged into a beginning, middle, and end, inviting the listener on a shared journey.

Stories are alluring because they trigger the innate human desire to connect with others, to see a plot unfold and a conflict resolved. They’re an effective way to make sense of our world and share that understanding with others.

Stories are central to human existence, found in every known culture. A common narrative helps unite people – whether in a village, a cathedral or an office. Beyond that, stories are used to reinforce community values, to teach lessons, and to proliferate traditions and customs.


Why Are Stories So Impactful?


Storytelling evokes a human connection that helps people better digest, synthesize, and remember important concepts and ideas. And yet, in business, we typically think of stories as something marketing teams and bloggers produce. But the reach of stories is far greater than that. We all love a good book. Movies and TV shows are some of the world’s most coveted pastimes. Children around the world beg their parents for bedtime stories each night (often the same one again and again!). They don’t get the same joy out of hearing a shopping list. Why is that? The human brain is wired to think in narratives. When we hear a story, we subconsciously relate it to our previous experiences, or our future goals, and adjust our thinking accordingly.

Within your organization, a shared story about a leader, manager, or employee taking on a challenge, overcoming it, and learning something from it can expand people’s perspectives and give them the opportunity to explore new ideas and behaviors.

Stories Are Like Staging a House

Have you ever purchased a house? Or watched a television show about buying a house? If you’ve done either, you’ve likely noticed that the houses you tend to immediately connect with are the ones that are staged, that is, the furniture in each room suggests how that room can be used by its new owners. Often, this furniture is chic, brand new, and is arranged to show prospective buyers: This is what your new life here can look like.

By staging each room, realtors are telling their clients a story.

A staged house lights up your brain. You can see and feel yourself living there, engaged in everyday activities like eating breakfast, relaxing in front of the fireplace, reading a book in the cozy corner. Your challenges and questions fall away, replaced by ideas and more personal tweaks you’d make if you owned it. You’re less likely to question the utility of an awkward nook or an oddly placed porch if it’s staged to suggest how you could use it.

Stories do the same: they give us a concrete sense of how we can take on a situation ourselves, replacing our pushback with opportunity, perhaps even opening up a world of ideas that you wouldn’t have otherwise thought possible or appealing.


Susan Weinschenk Ph.D., Psychology Today, Nov. 2014

“You are literally using more of your brain when you are listening to a story. And because you are having a richer brain event, you enjoy the experience more, you understand the information more deeply, and retain it longer.”

For these reasons, stories are the conduits that will drive change at your organization. They’ll help you and your team persuade others to believe, to participate, to remember what to do and why, and to feel proud of the change happening across the organization.

At Glint, we find that the biggest hurdle to continued success for our customer organizations is getting managers to take ownership of their employee engagement results. Our champions want to encourage managers to have lightweight, frequent conversations with their teams, and to take incremental actions, focusing on one or two areas of change.

To accomplish this, they typically reach for the familiar tools of data (“Sixty percent of managers have taken action!”) or manager training.

But data and training don’t go viral. They don’t make managers feel empowered, enabled, or inspired to take action on their teams’ results, only stories have that effect. By showing managers not only that their peers are taking action, but how, they’ll start to feel like they can do it, too.

As an HR leader, it will be up to you to find the stories taking place across your organization, package them, and share them in a format that’s accessible to the right people at the right time.

According to Shawn Callahan, author of Putting Stories to Work, when

small stories are told consistently over time, they help employees understand what concrete actions need to be taken and how. Here’s how you’ll find those stories and spread them like wildflowers.

Become the Catalyst for Change Through Simple, Compelling Stories

Stories Are Used by the Most Influential Leaders

Leaders are expected to influence and inspire others. But they don’t wield their influence by sharing facts and figures. Instead, they turn to stories as a way to help people understand, remember, and even take action. Industry influencers like Brené Brown, Malcolm Gladwell, Richard Branson, and Simon Sinek are masters at harnessing stories to get a point across.

Consider how politicians tell stories to attach a human face to what can seem like issues and concerns beyond our purview. No wonder US presidents have increasingly worked storytelling into their State of the Union addresses.



Finding Stories


Unlike a novelist, you won’t be creating stories from your imagination. The stories you’ll be telling will come from your people: leaders, managers, and employees who have either made change happen or have been witness to change. Where do you start?

It’s likely that your co-workers won’t be running into your office sharing their experiences with you. In more cases than not, they won’t even realize that their experience counts as a “story” and, once they do, they will try to tell you that it’s not a good one.

When we’re going about our own work, it can be difficult to see a story beyond the minutiae and day-to-day. It’s much easier to spot a story in someone else’s situation. As the champion for employee engagement in your company, it will be your role to identify and often craft people’s stories.

Once you lay the foundation for finding the stories that will best serve your engagement program goals, you’ll notice stories everywhere you turn.

Identify your engagement program goals

Look for micro-moments of change

Build stories through strategic questions

Create a simple narrative

1.2.3.4.

Common Pushback You’ll Hear When Soliciting Stories

“It’s not a good story.”“We just got started. Check back in a year.”“Here’s a list of facts… with no narrative.”

Push through. Listen to their experiences and play back the magic you hear, and how their story will help others take action to improve team engagement.


Remember: A story doesn’t have to be about a night-to-day transformation. When you ask your managers for stories about change on their teams, you’ll likely hear, “We’re just getting started. It’s too early. Give me another year to nail this.”

The most useful stories are often the small moments of change, like a manager learning that employees feel misaligned and implementing a weekly standup meeting. These stories are the ones that help other managers see that they have the time and the agency to effect change on their teams. They’ll help your managers and their teams imagine themselves taking small, attainable steps. They also give them ideas that they can adapt to their own teams. An easy place to find these transformation stories is a tool you already have at your disposal: the Glint dashboard. A trend line is the beginning of a story. Review your organization’s heat maps to pinpoint changes on individual groups and teams. Then ask the team’s manager what they learned from the trend and what they’ve done about it.

The first step is to identify what you’re hoping to achieve with your stories.

Consider: What behaviors do you want to highlight for managers (for example, following the ACT Framework)? What beliefs do you want to drive (e.g., it’s not that hard to take action, the process can be lightweight.)? Perhaps you want to bust myths or encourage action-taking across a particular group of managers. Whatever your goals, write them down in the place where you’ll collect your stories. This will form the basis of your search, help you articulate your needs to story holders, and tee up the narratives you’ll eventually share.

Identify Your Goals And the Story You Want to Tell

Look For Micro-moments of Change

1. 2.

https://www.glintinc.com/blog/why-conversations-are-the-fuel-for-action-taking/


When soliciting stories, it’s best to do a basic interview with a leader, manager, or employee to get more information about his or her experience. To build a compelling narrative, you can gather different perspectives from a variety of employees involved in a specific experience. It’s the collection of these responses that build an overarching story.

Here is a basic interview questionnaire you can use with any team member and adapt based on your goals:

Record the answers to these questions and organize them in chronological order. Hone in on what these managers and teams did differently than their peers — these will be the most important educational elements to your story.

What challenges/frustrations were your team facing and how were they holding the team back?

What did you learn from your team’s engagement results?

What was the outcome?

How have your action-taking practices set you up to drive toward continuous improvement over time?

What specific action was taken to address the insight(s)?

How did you involve your employees?

Build Effective Stories With Strategic Questions

Before Key Insight

ResultResponse

3.

B.I.T.S.: Building Inspiration Through Stories

At Glint, we call this process of finding, packaging, and sharing stories B.I.T.S., which stands for “Building Inspiration Through Stories.” The term B.I.T.S. was intentionally chosen to reflect the size and scope of the stories we look for. They’re not full case studies. They’re moments, memories, or quotes that demonstrate a desired behavior or evidence of the change. To sustain this program, we enable a cross-functional group of champions to identify, solicit, and encouraging the sharing of stories in their areas.


When telling stories about managers taking action, be mindful of the outcomes you want to encourage: is your story asking people to focus on the numbers, or on changing specific behaviors? A focus on scores and responses might convey the wrong message, encouraging managers and leaders to focus on ramping up scores and response rates, rather than driving positive behaviors and increasing trust.

Remember: Data adds credibility and validity, but it’s not emotional. It doesn’t answer the question, “How did change occur?” Telling your organization that a manager increased recognition by 8 points in one quarter is an intriguing stat but does little to inspire others to make the changes needed to achieve that type of improvement.

Once you’ve gathered the responses to your strategic questions, potentially from multiple team members, you’ll stitch them together into a simple narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. These narratives can be shared in many formats.

The beginning of the story sets up the journey to come. Look for moments of enlightenment in your line of questioning, and opportunities to contrast with the ending. Here, you’ll want to include a sense of why a change was needed and what was at stake (retention, performance, or belonging, for example).

The middle of the story tells how change has occured. Encourage your storytellers to describe their processes, and how those differ from before.

The end of the story shows us the new reality, or what’s happened as a result of changes made. Probe for small pieces of evidence, like numbers or quotes, to demonstrate that change has occurred and that the risks have been avoided. Keep in mind that you don’t need a fairy tale ending – the important factor to demonstrate is the thought process of your team members that others can learn from.

In all elements of your stories, take care to be as specific as possible. Use names and dates and describe explicitly what someone did to achieve change and how they felt. These details may feel unique

to one person’s experience, but they help others relate to the story. They’re the lifeblood of the story that gives it sticking power (more on this below).

Create a Simple Narrative

A Note on Using Data

4.


To help your stories go viral, apply six principles of stickiness from the book Made to Stick by brothers Chip and Dan Heath, paraphrased below:

The best stories include at least one of these elements. While your stories don’t need to include all six, the more, the better!

Tell Stories With Staying Power

Determine the core of your message and stick to the story that supports it. Leave out the other details.

SimpleUse authoritative details to give your audience a reason to believe your story is true. Data points, quotes from leaders, and personal experience serve to validate the story.

Credible

The more something differs from our traditional schemas, the more it will hold attention. A factory manager holding standup meetings with her team? Now I’m intrigued! Pull back the curtain on some of the unusual or innovative things going on with teams around the business.

Unexpected

Use explicit details — like managers’ or team members’ names and titles — to make your story more memorable. Fight the compulsion to be broad. Contrary to popular belief, a story about an individual is more relatable than a story about the broadest group of people.

ConcreteUse specific examples to show people how a problem might be solved. Stories drive action through simulation (what to do) and inspiration (the motivation to do it).

Examples

People relate to other people’s feelings. Tap into the empathy of your people by sharing how the characters felt before, during, and after making changes.

Emotional


Putting Your Stories to Use


If you’ve been diligent, patient, and focused, you will ultimately compile stories that demonstrate the changes occurring within your organization. These stories will inspire and educate your managers and leaders to try their hand at making changes on their teams.

Stories can spread like wildflowers when you plant them in the right places. To that end:

Because you want to make your stories the right length to hold people’s attention, keep these guidelines in mind for different formats:

• Include them in presentations and meetings

• Arm your team with stories so they spread through your champions

• Share them with executives and leaders

• Publish them in newsletters and on your intranet

• Tell them in meetings

• Videos: Aim for less than two minutes if more than one person is speaking. Keep it under 60 seconds if it’s just one person.

• Written stories: These can be as short as one sentence and as long as 1,000 words, depending on the level of detail you share. Consider your distribution channels and the attention spans of your audience before publishing.

When and Where to Share Stories Internally

Consider Your Formats

Don’t Let Stories Slip Away

As you hear stories, document them in a central and easily accessible place. This can be a set of slides, a team drive, or wherever you typically save important files. At Glint, we house them on our company-wide content management platform.


A number of Glint customers have successfully shared stories to inspire widespread change at their organizations.

HCA Healthcare’s UK arm, made up of 5,000 employees, conducted interviews with managers across the business to develop a booklet entitled “Your stories: How your Vital Voices feedback is making a difference.” The special edition book includes fourteen anecdotes of how teams are making small, impactful changes on their teams to respond to engagement challenges. The stories represent a diverse range of teams and managers, and include quotes from team members, as well as an opening note from the CEO and an email address to which team members can send stories as they happen. The team at HCA shared the booklet virtually with all colleagues, and the hard copies flew off the shelves.

The engagement team at Sky – Europe’s leading entertainment and communications company with 31,000 employees – uses stories to bust myths, drive participation in the engagement program, and reinforce the collective impact of managers’ efforts. In addition to publishing the company-wide Glint scores on Sky’s intranet every quarter, the engagement team also emphasizes the value of managers’ participation in the engagement process. The team shares with managers their impact, celebrates managers with high engagement scores, and asks those managers to share what they’ve done to create great environments for their people.

Because of the team’s emphasis on sharing these stories, the company’s leadership sees the value of the engagement initiative. In fact, Sky’s CEO said Glint is the most important app its leaders have – and if they don’t agree, they’re working at the wrong company.

Another example of effectively using stories comes from United Technologies Corporation (UTC). This 200,000-employee aerospace company analyzed the comments it received to this Glint survey question, “What’s one thing you want your manager to keep doing?” As a result, it developed a program around the Top 5 Manager Behaviors. It then shares and promotes this theme by:

Email security organization Mimecast shared its employee engagement story at one of its monthly “Rallies” to both recognize the efforts of the HR, leadership, and management teams, as well as to keep employees energized about sharing feedback.

Case Studies

• Referencing the behaviors in every newsletter

• Publishing profiles of managers who are demonstrating these behaviors

• Regularly asking managers if they’re engaging in these behaviors


Three Examples of Manager Stories

Paulo, a front-of-house manager at HCA Healthcare UK, heard from his team of 50 that communications and growth were two key areas for him to focus on. In response, he implemented dedicated drop-in sessions to allow busy team members to raise concerns and highlight the team’s strengths. He also worked with his team to organize a development day, bringing together stakeholders from across the business to share more about the growth opportunities available at HCA. Paulo says he’s seen improved participation in team meetings and higher service delivery since making these changes — and the team feels more connected and involved as a result.

On the HR team at Vox, work-life balance was identified as an issue. In the comments, it was revealed that team members felt they needed to be online around the clock, because they’d routinely get Slack messages from their leader at all hours, whenever she thought of an idea or a question. In response, the leader implemented a practice of scheduling her messages to land in her team’s inbox during regular hours, and communicated that their free time is valuable to her.

After Varian’s most recent engagement pulse, Tracy, the leader of the Service and Strategic marketing team, and her team identified an opportunity to improve their change communication. The team brainstormed and ultimately implemented a cadence of regular team offsites where they could come together across many locations to build trust, community and collaborate in person. The team used the first offsite to dive deeper into addressing their survey feedback and worked together to overcome fear of conflict and inaction to results to make progress on their plan.


To get the most from your powerful stories, share them with your teams responsible for marketing, communications, and brand, who can then spread them outside your company. These stories help improve the perception of your company’s brand with potential employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. Case in point: Ancestry’s talent acquisition team hosts a short video on its public Careers page. This video shares the story of how the company uses Glint, illustrating that the organization is both purpose-driven and committed to the happiness and success of its people. When it comes to spreading ideas through your organization, stories are a secret weapon waiting to be harnessed. Stories help us persuade more effectively than stats and data alone, and they are far more memorable and shareable. With the right questions and a little persistence, you can surface the inspiring experiences of team members to drive belief, increase adoption, and accelerate people success across your organization.

How to Share Your Story with the World

Ready to deploy stories to accelerate transformation? Reach out to Glint for help!

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